Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Let's Freeze Gubmint Spending



This is the "NEW" economic strategy put forth by House Minority Leader John Boehner(R-OH). Freeze government spending as America, and the world, stumble towards the abyss of economic disaster. This hearkens back to the Golden Age of the GOP during Ronald Reagan's presidency...a very different time and a very different world. Never mind that Reagonomics failed then too. Rather than invest the money siphoned to corporations and the wealthy on new infrastructure and technology, American corporations bought up their smaller competitors in an orgy of mergers, the end result being less competition in the marketplace, decreased productivity and more economic power in fewer hands. There was no "trickle down" of prosperity to anyone outside the rarified atmosphere of America's top 1%.

Desperate for ideas in the face of their growing irrelevancy, the intellectual bankruptcy of the GOP leadership reveals itself in their continued reliance on the discredited ideas. Reaganomics...tax cuts for the wealthy...continuing with the policies that have led us to our current straights...They propose to essentially do nothing in the face of an economic crisis which could dwarf the scope and magnitude of the Great Depression.

The GOP has become the party of Hoover...He did nothing after the stock market crash of 1929...history has shown us the consequences of inaction. The shanty towns that resulted from Hoover's paralysis became known as "Hoovervilles". Should Representative Boehner's plan of inaction gain a foothold, will the shanty towns that rise amidst the ruins of the nation's economy be known as "Boehnervilles"? That would be unfortunate given the phonetic pronunciation of Representative Boehner's name. As we all learned in school, "When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking."

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